AMD In Buoyant Mood Over VRMark Cyan Room Release Scores

FutureMark this week launched Cyan Room, a brand new GPU benchmarking tool in the VRMark suite that complements both VRMark the more comprehensive 3DMark toolsets. Distinct from the mainstream Orange Room and Extreme 5K Blue Room tools, Cyan Room is built from the ground up using DirectX 12 rendering and tests the capabilities of GPUs within VR environments both in terms of raw FPS and frame-by-frame.

ABOUT CYAN ROOM

Benchmark

Cyan Room is a DirectX 12 benchmark. It features a large, complex scene and many eye-catching effects. Cyan Room shows how using an API with less overhead can help developers deliver impressive VR experiences even on modest PC systems.

Experience

VR systems use clever techniques to compensate for missed frames. Even when the frame rate is low, you may be surprised by the quality of the experience. Use Experience mode with a VR headset to judge the performance of a system with your own eyes.

Features

- Pure DirectX 12 VR engine built in-house. - Detailed charts show performance frame-by-frame. - Change resolution and more with custom settings. - Run it on your desktop monitor or a VR headset.

As is traditional when a new test is released, existing GPUs in the market are put through their paces, and AMD have been the first to publish findings from their own internal labs. From AMD's perspective they make extremely gratifying viewing, as you can see below:

Both the RX Vega 56 and 64 appear to perform markedly better than their competition, namely the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Ti. All three hits scores well above 5500, but only AMD are shown as able to exceed 7000 marks. Notable by its absence is the GTX 1080 Ti, likely not included due to the Vega 64 being no real competition for it.

Lower down the scale, the AMD RX 580 outperforms the GTX 1060 6GB, once again showing how accomplished AMD is when it comes to DirectX 12 even at the more affordable end of the performance GPU market. As the 580 comes down in price towards the end of the year it could once again become a very valid option for DirectX 12 and premium VR gaming in particular.

Looking at Frames per Second, the results are broadly in line with scores. Of the cards tested only the GTX 1060 6GB is unable to hit the 90fps sweet spot, which AMD have stated amount to minimum rather than average or 99th percentile FPS results. If that can be reliably reproduced expect NVIDIA to address the lower than acceptable frame rates in a driver update.

The test system was built around a Ryzen 7 1800X CPU, taking advantage of the multi-threaded capabilities of the Cyan Room test.

So, all told it's exceptionally good news for AMD. If this particular benchmark gathers popularity don't be surprised when NVIDIA strike back with a tweak driver for improved performance, but just as with Forza 7 last month the ladies and gents in Red appear to be nailing it when it comes to Day-0 DirectX 12 performance with both Vega and Polaris architectures. Just be aware that the usual caveats apply when it comes to non-independent testing.

VRMark Cyan Room is available as part of the VRMark Suite, which also includes both Orange Room and Blue Room tools. The suite of tools, as well as 3DMark and PCMark, are currently for sale on Steam at a reduced price: